Current Fellows in the Biostatistics Branch

Ana Best, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Ana Best, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a postdoctoral fellow in the spring of 2015. She received her B.Sc. in probability and statistics (2010) and her Ph.D. in statistics (2015) from McGill University, under the supervision of Prof. David Wolfson. For her dissertation, Dr. Best investigated the theory and benefits of risk-set-sampling within prevalent cohort survival studies. She is now working under the mentorship of Sholom Wacholder, Ph.D., senior investigator, BB, on risk modeling and prediction for breast cancer and lung cancer, as well as methodological questions arising from cancer screening. She is also working with Philip Rosenberg, Ph.D., senior investigator, BB, on modeling and methodological questions pertaining to Li-Fraumeni Syndrome.

Ting-Huei Chen, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Ting-Huei Chen, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) and Radiation Epidemiology Branch (REB) in the summer of 2014. She pursued her Ph.D. degree in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with thesis advisors Drs. Wei Sun and Jason Fine. Currently, she is working under the mentorship of Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D., Senior Investigator and Chief of BB, to build genetic scores for cancer risk prediction. She is also working with Lindsay Morton, Ph.D., Investigator in the Radiation Epidemiology Branch, and Joshua Sampson, Ph.D., Investigator in BB, to study the second cancer risk associated genetic susceptibility.

Andriy Derkach, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Andriy Derkach, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a postdoctoral fellow after receiving his Ph.D. from the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. For his doctoral dissertation, Dr. Derkach developed new methods for testing associations with groups of rare genetic variants, and extended the underlying theory to make general claims about the properties of score tests for association under response-dependent sampling. Dr. Derkach will work with Joshua Sampson, Ph.D., investigator in BB, to identify biological mediators that link exposures with the risk of cancer.

Christine Fermo, B.A. – Postbaccalaureate Fellow

Christine Fermo, B.A., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) in June 2013 as a summer intern and became a postbaccalaureate fellow in November 2013. She received a B.A. in mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (2013). Currently, Ms. Fermo is working with Sholom Wacholder, Ph.D., Senior Investigator in BB, on developing web tools for estimating risk stratification from early biomarker data. She is also working on determining the optimal proportion of cases to controls that yields precise estimates of positive predictive value (PPV) and the complement of the negative predictive value (cNPV).

Xing Hua, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Xing Hua, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a postdoctoral fellow in April 2013. Dr. Hua worked in the Department of Physiology and Cancer Center of the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) as a visiting scholar from 2011 and received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2012. His Ph.D. thesis focused on developing statistical methods and algorithms for analyzing cancer genome sequencing data, including calling somatic mutations and detecting driver genes. Dr. Hua is now working with Jianxin Shi, Ph.D., Investigator, BB, to develop methods for driver gene detection across cancer sites, detect mutations affecting survival, and perform statistical analysis of lung cancer tumor sequencing data.

Noorie Hyun, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Noorie Hyun joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a postdoctoral fellow in the summer of 2014. Dr. Hyun recently received a Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of North Carolina. For her Ph.D. thesis, she developed semiparametric models for time-to-event determined by a longitudinal biomarker and threshold accounting for measurement error in the biomarker value and threshold varying across sub-populations. In BB, she works under the mentorship of Hormuzd A. Katki, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, to develop methodology for using epidemiologic studies to better evaluate cancer risks, and potential benefits and harms from cancer prevention programs, with application to lung cancer screening. She also works with Anil Chaturvedi, Ph.D., Investigator in the Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch, on developing risk prediction models for oral cancers.

Paige Maas, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Paige Maas, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) in the fall of 2009 as the first participant in the Biostatistics in Cancer Epidemiology Predoctoral Training Program, a partnership between NCI and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She received her bachelor's degree in applied mathematics with minors in biology and psychology from Pomona College in 2009 and her Ph.D. in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the summer of 2014. Dr. Maas's research interests include absolute risk modeling for breast cancer subtypes and regression calibration methods that make use of information in published studies and cancer registries. She has also collaborated with fellow NIH researchers to study heterogeneity in the relationship between alcohol and the risk of various breast cancer subtypes.

Marlena Maziarz, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Marlena Maziarz, Ph.D. joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a postdoctoral fellow in June 2015. She received her M.Sc. in Computer Science (2003) from the University of Toronto, and a her Ph.D. in Biostatistics (2015) from the University of Washington, Seattle, under the supervision of Prof. Yingye Zheng. For her dissertation, Dr. Maziarz worked on risk prediction and evaluation of predictions based on longitudinal biomarkers in cohort and two-phase studies. She is now working under the mentorship of Ruth Pfeiffer, Ph.D., senior investigator, BB, on methodological questions arising in the design of observational studies and on uses of risk models for population screening. She also plans to address statistical questions arising in disease prevention.

Orestis Panagiotou, M.D., Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Orestis Panagiotou, M.D., Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) in January 2013. Originally from Ioannina, Greece, he completed his primary and secondary education in Greece and Germany. He graduated with an M.D. degree from the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in July 2009 and subsequently pursued his Ph.D. in genetic epidemiology there, with his thesis advisor Dr. John Ioannidis. Dr. Panagiotou's Ph.D. training, funded by the 7th Framework Program of the European Union, included several aspects of epidemiology, including genomic and molecular epidemiology, risk prediction, clinical trials and meta-analysis/meta-epidemiology. Currently, he is working under the mentorship of Sholom Wacholder, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, BB, on addressing methodological questions pertaining to the epidemiology of lung, cervical and liver cancers. Dr Panagiotou is open to collaborations with investigators from other DCEG branches on projects related to the genetic and molecular etiology of cancer as well as implementation of research findings into clinical practice.

Minsun Song, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Minsun Song, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) in June 2012 as a visiting fellow. Dr. Song received a B.S. and M.S. in statistics from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Chicago. During her doctoral studies, she worked on statistical methods for testing gene-gene interaction under inequality constraints for both typed and untyped SNPs under the supervision of Prof. Dan Nicolae. After that, she worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Her research at Princeton involved modeling and testing associations under the presence of arbitrary population structure. Dr. Song is now working under Nilanjan Chatterjee, Ph.D., Senior Investigator and Chief of the Biostatistics Branch, to develop statistical methodologies for a powerful test of goodness-of-fit under the logistic model framework and for test and inference of genetic and environmental effects for untyped SNPs in a two-stage framework, where in the first stage the missing values are imputed and then the tests are performed on the imputed values.

Han Zhang, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Fellow

Han Zhang, Ph.D., joined the Biostatistics Branch (BB) as a visiting fellow in August 2011. Dr. Zhang received Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His Ph.D. thesis focused on developing algorithms for haplotype analysis under pooling and individual design. He is now working with Kai Yu, Ph.D., Senior Investigator, BB, on the statistical approaches for rare variants association analysis and gene-gene interaction analysis in case-control studies.